eCom Unity #10 - Holistic Retention Principles

Deep-Dive | 7 Principles For Your Retention Communication

For most brands email marketing and retention marketing is the same.

This isn't the case.

We found that email marketing only increases retention by a little over 20%.

The tough part? You can’t force retention onto your customers.

If they don’t like your product, they will not come back.

A great product is the backbone of any retention strategy.

But how should you approach your retention once you have a great product?

Let me share 7 categories that every single piece of communication to existing active customers should fall into to to realise the full lifetime value of your customers:

#1 Add new use cases for your product

Most people buy a product for a very specific purpose. But most products can be used in more than one way.

Tell them. Show them.

The more they use your product the higher your purchase frequency is.

Like we did at yfood: expanding an initial use case from lunch to breakfast and travel.

#2 Increase feature usage of your product

Similar but different. Here it is not about the different use cases but about different features of the product.

Less frequent for most eCom products but if it exists can be a powerful way to increase customer satisfaction.

#3 Increase frequency of use

Essentially that means that you try to ensure that your customers use your product every time they can.

Not for additional use cases (that’s #1) but for ones they already know.

This could be done by sending reminders at the right point in time or telling them that they can achieve better results by using the product more frequently.

If your product has certain seasonalities built-in, this can work well. If not, it’s extremely difficult.

By using your product more, the will need to replenish sooner which will increase CLV in the process.

#4 Increase perceived benefit

Maybe your customers bought your product and received a certain benefit.

But what if your product has more benefits that they are not aware of?

Well, tell them.

It’ll make them feel better about their purchase and increase the perceived value they are getting from your product which will reduce churn.

#5 Make them remember why they started using your product

If you keep using your product day in and day out, you might forget why you started it in the first place as the benefits become less and less evident.

Be sure to make your customers remember the pain they used to feel every now and then and how you helped them solve it.

A simple example for this? Before-and-after visuals for skincare products.

#6 Mix things up

Once you like something, you usually stick with it for a long time.

But after some time you will get bored with it and need a change. At that point (or ideally just before it) you need to be there and offer an alternative.

Otherwise, your customer might just stop buying your product.

And getting him back into the same habit as before is more difficult than stopping him from breaking the habit in the first place.

So if a customer is always ordering the same flavour, it is likely that they will get bored by it after some time. Thus you could include new flavours free of charge in the 4th order so that they already find a new flavour they like and can start using when they get bored of their current flavour.

#7 Build brand affinity

Let’s be honest. Most products are generic.

And with generic products, people will not just opt for the cheapest option if the love the brand.

And/or they like how they feel about themselves when they use your product.

Or how others perceive them when they use your product.

They might continue using your product even though the product wouldn’t justify it.

This is very much about changing the perceived value of your product.

And the reason why brand is one of the only moats you can build as an eCom company.

Brand Breakdown | Wild

New week, new brand that got me curious about how they became so successful:

Wild. They have grown to 50m in annual revenue by selling deodorants.

I again looked through their entire marketing & sales process to understand their approach and strategy.

You can access the full customer journey breakdown here: Open Wild Board

These are some of my highlights of Wild’s approach:

1. They have an extreme diverse set of creatives with different formats, benefits, styles, stages, hooks, etc. incl. brand performance videos

2. The whole site feels super premium (with unusual features for low-price products like engraving)

3. Marketing cases as much as the main product to give the buyer the feeling of choosing a product he will like (as for scent it’s very tough to communicate)

4. They don’t target men at all which allows to target women very specifically

I explain & show all these and also where I see room for improvement in this video:

Upcoming Events | Webinar on International Scaling

In exactly two weeks, Nest Commerce is hosting a virtual panel series ‘Going global in 2025: A seminar on international scaling’, starting on December 5th at 2 pm.

I’ll join as a panelist on ‘Germany: a guide to Europe’s economic powerhouse’ alongside Christoph Schliecker-Magnani (Meta), Rachel Bowditch (Melber), and Luke Costley-White (Project A Ventures), starting at 4:20 pm.

The panel series will be all about the international scaling strategies and the question of how to mitigate the risk of one’s home market, considering economic challenges in Europe and growing opportunities in the US.

You can sign up for free here: https://events.nestcommerce.co/en-gb/nest-december-international-virtual-event

Thank you for reading :)

I am on a mission to help eCom brands build better, more profitable businesses. If you missed any past issues, you can catch up on all of them here.

I have built one 8-figure and one 9-figure eCom brand in the past and with Klar, I work with over 700 eCom brands today.

If you have specific questions you would like me to cover next, just reply to this email.

Have a great week.

Max ✌️

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